The Social Media Minute

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah...ahem...right.
On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute's worth of scanning.

Facebook Adds Mini Feed Comments

The Facebook mini-feed, which tracks a profile-owner's updates in Facebook, can be configured to track personal activity on other sites like YouTube and Digg. The addition of comments to this update stream may sound like a trivial addition, but the service now mimics the conversational model of FriendFeed.com, which has proved wildly popular among early Social Media adopters.
More at Webware, and the Facebook developers blog on the subject.

Mixx Gets Communities

Mixx is one of the perennial underachievers of the social news space. A Digg clone (sorry, but it has to be said), it's the most visually appealing and sensibly presented of the new kids on the block. Except that it’s not really all that new and if it’s ever going to take off, it’ll have to be soon.
To wit: something completely different from the Mixx team: communities. See: http://www.mixx.com/groups.
Mixx is calling this thing " Ning for social media". Which makes us ask: We sorta thought Ning was the Ning for Social Media, dude. I mean what would you call it?
In any case, Mixx Communities is pretty sweet, and does indeed enable Ning-style personalized community building within its framework, on your own sub-domain (e.g., Techcrunch’s community).
The only reservation we would have with this noble effort would be the potential dilution of Mixx’s raison d’etre. Maybe they should stick to being the best Mixx they can be, and let Ning continue to be Ning?
More from TechCrunch/WashPost here.

Reddit Goes Open Source

In a bid to usurp the mighty Digg, social news website Reddit announced on Tuesday that it was going Open Source. Business Week had this to say: "What makes reddit’s move interesting isn’t its novelty. What makes reddit’s move worth writing about is that reddit isn’t just a tech company. It’s a tech company owned by a big traditional media company, Condé Nast.'
In truth, this would be worth writing about regardless of the publisaurus lurking behind the scenes. Despite a huge array of similar news ranking/aggregating services, and heavyweight intervention from the likes of Yahoo! (Buzz) , Digg remains the big dog in the yard and any moves to shake up competition in the area is welcome. Let’s hope we see some innovation coming out of this move.

Twitter Gets Bezos Backing and Hires Google Man

Twitter got another barrel of investment cash this week, as Jeff Bezos waded in with one of his famous ‘Offers You Can’t Refuse’ (ever hear the one about Bezos and the Band Leader?) . The cash will go towards updating the bank of Commodore 64s Twitter currently uses as servers. Om Malik broke this story, and you can read further at ReadWriteWeb. As part of the deal: Someday -- and this day may never come -- Twitter may be called on to do a favor for Jeff.
Twitter is also doubling the size of its Operations team. One of its new people in Operations is Google man Rudy Winnaker. Feel sorry for the WaGs: he, John Adams, and the rest of the Operations team are going to be some bleary-eyed mofos this summer if the service problems of the recent past continue.

Ruby: Scaling to a Billion Views with LinkedIn Widget

On the subject of Twitter, everyone who regularly uses the service will know all about the issues it has had with downtime in recent months. The fundamental problem, so we are told, is that Twitter is built on Rails. And, as everyone (apparently) knows, 'Rails Don't Scale'.
ZDNet carried a story on how LinkedIn is running a Ruby on Rails application on Facebook which manages 1 billion page views per month. The app in question is Bumpersticker, 'a relatively trivial Facebook application that allows you to create a cartoon that you can put on your Facebook friends’ sites.'
Whether or not Rails can handle grown-up levels of Web application demand continues to provoke, er... earnest debate. Does this implementation count?

Location Tracking Social Media

The US$ 199 iPhone is here, Google Android is just around the corner, and mobile Web applications grow more relevant by the day. And so, location tracking services designed to interface with Web applications are lauded as the next big thing. There are two notables on the lips of everyone in Social Media: Brightkite and Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle. Both allow you to update your physical location. Both augment existing Web services like Dopplr. Both are of little interest to most of us... so far. But both merit keeping an eye on.
* http://brightkite.com/ * http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/

CMSWire SEO Tip of the Fortnight

Our resident SEO expert says:

“If you’re writing a column on Social Media, why not change every 'SM' abbreviation to ‘S&M’. This will give your view count a timely boost.”

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